FATE seems to have inspired a loyal set of pretty fanatical fans, to which I account for by very effective marketing. For me, however, I have tried but simply cannot get traction on the game's appeal. Character's are presented in a rules-lite manner, and the core mechanic is pretty simple. However, the whole book just seems to go on and on about rules, rules discussion and then some more rules discussion. I don't really see where the massive innovation in the game is, as most of the ideas have already been done in much older games if you are prepared to look for them. It's neatly packaged, supported and comes at an appealing price - but, ultimately, I just find it a boring read and a so-so game to play in or run.

As with the previous 2nd editions of Chronicles of Darkness games, this is a highly polished effort with improved art direction, tidy rules and by it being a self contained game.The gnostic backstory is well telegraphed, however, which means holding mysteries from anyone who's seen The Matrix can be a challenge!

Notably, this Mage game is only half the size of it's intimidatingly huge cousin, Mage: The Ascension, and will be certainly easier to play for newcomers. It manages this by missing out on much of the more gonzo, philosophical and real world culture referencing material of the former though - and may feel a bit bland by comparison for the original game's fans. It's a toolkit for running modern magical stories alright, but it's not a game that seeks to make you believe in a magical world or look at the real world with a new perspective.

Regardless, it's a great addition to the Chronicles of Darkness line, which is consistently improving levels of excellence.

Alongside the French Arm Adventures and the Ships of the French Arm (plus the core rules), this presents enough material for running a successful 2300AD campaign for years. Of the three, this is probably the best place to start as the overview gives a good thematic grounding.

The presentation of the line continues to improve - with colour added to some illustrations and maps for the first time and the quality of the writing is good. It's an exotic setting, but well grounded in genuine hard science ideas - and this is good inspiration for those that may be jaded by the looser, more space opera elements of the default Third Imperium Traveller game. On the other hand, if you're not a hard science fan then the opposite may be more apposite - it's kinda like an 'Advanced' Traveller setting in this respect.

In all, though, this setting is really taking shape well now. Recommended.

Traveller has become such a core part of my gaming experience that criticising it is akin to trying to criticise The Beatles - there is something for everyone here. There is so much innate flexibility and gameablity contained within this book, including my absolute favourite game for character generation, world design and many simple but satisfying in-game systems. Some may grumble on cost and/or the decision to make a new edition, but the revisions generally improve game flow and the art and interior decor were much needed. The game still provides a multitude of story ideas in a lean, mean package and for my money, it's the best science fiction game in the market. Thoroughly recommended.

While the sheer size of this volume may be intimidating, the truth is that this represents the best of the 20th Anniversary Classic World of Darkness games to date. The artwork is eye popping, the writing passionate and intense (reminiscent of the old school 90s White Wolf writers), while the central premise is mind blowing to the uninitiated.

There are some excellent new developments in terms of creating your own paradigm and style of magic, which still hangs on the core freeform magick (sic) system, while the setting material and various factions and groups accumulated through the years are all there, looking and reading both modern and fresh. The sheer variety of characters you can play, or interact with makes this very much an immersive, kitchen sink setting. One moment you might be fighting in the gutter, the next floating in the spiritual heavens with angels. And everything else in between. It's an effective combination of postmodern fantasy, psychedelic melodrama and existential depth.

While there are some quibbles with a few semantic definitions (the Forces Sphere, for example) and a few oddly arbitrary decisions occasionally made in both setting and rules, the impact of the whole cannot be denied. It's the ultimate RPG of modern magick.

Considering the instability of the various RuneQuest/Legend editions, and with Chaosium due to release another RuneQuest edition next year, it was probably quite a wise move to develop the Renaissance system as it's own thing.

However, there is nothing better than an entirely self contained game and setting and this one has great potential now that it's been formatted this way. The layout and organisation is sound, with some nice illustrations of the period and the writing is clear and compelling.

It's sits nicely alongside the Clockwork and Chivalry game (also Renaissance based but set about 100 years earlier), and offers some excellent Cthuluoid scares in an 18th Century London setting. It does beg the question whether the Clockwork and Cthulhu supplement will also get a 2nd edition with a full set of rules in the future? Indeed, one wonders whether they can keep making historical settings of this ilk in maybe the 19th and 16th Centuries too? It would certainly make a fine collection!

Certainly an improvement from the unedited and flatly impenetrable version originally published from the kickstarter. The index is welcome, while the additional 50 pages or so are mainly used to provide clarification, a slightly tidier layout and a more logical organisation of the book. There is no linkable contents menu, however, which is also pretty vital for a pdf and the cover on my copy was missing still.

Certain rules clarifications that are now included make the accusation of it being ‘unplayable’ an overstatement, but it is still most likely to be an overwhelmingly complex book for casual gamers or those with any sort of aversion to maths. That said, I’m not sure that was ever the market for this game. For existing Traveller fans, there is a lot of material that will undoubtedly be useful for their games.

EDIT: Further to my original comments after reading through more fully (and it does take some reading!), there are some genuine gems within this book. I can see the logic - finally - of using a variable dice pool, roll-under system as opposed to the fixed 2D6 system used in Classic and Mongoose Traveller. Firstly, it meshes more tightly with the Characteristic scores used and secondly, it’s simply more open ended in terms of operating on a universal scale. The probability charts at the end of the book give a clear indication of your chances and, fully developed it looks pretty smooth.

Character generation is more involved than before with the role of education fully integrated and with differing paths for each career. You can also create a genetic legacy, while options for sophonts, clones and robots are fully detailed. The various ‘Maker’ sections have fuller explanations, along with starship and world designs. There are some interesting scientific asides as well as advice for running games throughout the text.

This is not a game for novices, and there are still lots of issues about editing throughout. But for Traveller fans, there is something of real worth and investment at the core. Recommended.

Deserved of all the accolades it receives, Feng Shui was a seminal RPG of action movie violence that utilised a time-travel/alternative history conceit to be able to mesh together multiple settings into one big shoot out.

Feng Shui 2 steps up the physical presentation to a full colour edition closer to the vision of the original Daedalus Games game (before the company went belly up). The rules are also reviewed and streamlined, with some good additional sub-systems (like car chases) and an updated setting (with some sensible revisions to the future setting - including road warrior chimps..). The game runs faster than before and the setting is more open. If you haven’t experienced it before, and like the idea of action movie melodrama, you really need to give it a shot. One of the best introductory RPGs out there.

As with other NWoD titles, Werewolf is frequently judged in comparison to what came before, and this will be no exception. I largely grew up with the old Werewolf: The Apocalypse game, where the political themes (environmentalism) were much more prevalent and pervasive.

Werewolf: The Forsaken largely irons much of this out, and makes the game more directly about defending a particular territory against weird, invading, animistic spirits. In this regards, it’s actually closer to The Whispering Vault in some respects than it’s mother game. The game is also a lot more concise, focussed and flexible in effect. The previous (1st) edition of the game suffered a little insofar that there was too much fluff text. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but compared to the more emotive concepts involved in Werewolf: the Apocalypse, it felt a bit dry. You were also required to buy another book for the core rules. The second edition is punchier in delivery, with consistent artwork (mostly like the cover - in brown hues), and it’s a complete game in one.

The premise is still slightly compromised insofar that it’s game play requires that you don’t play a raging, force-of-nature, homicidal, solitary beast (as in the movies), but with this understanding it makes for a lot of good campaign play. The book squashes a lot into 320 pages, but is a tad more organised than Vampire: The Requiem while remaining highly compatible for crossovers. In all, an excellent development.

A game that always garnered huge passions from it’s fans, and kept fans returning largely due to the central concept of ‘consensual reality’. It’s hard to relate to the impact that this concept would have had on it’s fans upon first reading. The post-Matrix world has this type of postmodern, New-Agey idea in mainstream abundance these days, and it seems to be nothing new. At the time, however, it felt like you had been touched by genius upon reading it.

The game itself is very messy - a few too many unnecessary skills, confusing explanations and curious rules stipulations that don’t make sense. The organisation is a bit all over the place.

It never meshed especially well with the prior WoD games either - Vampires can hardly be running the world if the Technocracy is supposedly doing so too, Werewolves have their Umbra concepts compromised by Mage’s version of the same idea and, indeed, how can Vampires and Werewolves truly exist in a world dominated by a Technocracy-dominated paradigm? Shouldn’t they have been eradicated in this modernistic worldview?

Not a classic, as such, yet the passion and concepts still shine through in the writing - and that’s what gives it value. This is not a particularly good scan, however, it must be noted.

Changeling: The Dreaming was the last of the original five World Of Darkness games, and certainly by the time of the second edition the quality of the interior design (full colour), and overall visual quality of the game was breathtakingly good. It is probably the prettiest book I saw in the 1990s.

The game suffered, unfortunately, by being significantly different in tone to the previous games, in a manner similar to Mage: The Ascension - but much more pronounced. It’s far away from being gothic, now explicitly called ‘modern fantasy’ and simply doesn’t fit in well with the rest of the games in the series.

As a standalone game it works pretty well. The gameplay is a bit like a contemporary version of Shadowrun in some ways, with various gang-like antics being undertook by characters in their crypto-magical world (that only they can see). However, the fey archetypes are a little twee, some of the 'loss of childhood’ themes are a tad heavy-handed, and the Storyteller system had a few well-acknowledged clunks in it by this stage too.

It’s certainly worth a look - especially if you like sumptuous fantasy art - and it does play well with the right group. It will always be a slightly flawed masterpiece in my thoughts though.

This was never quite as bad as critics made it out to be - although the core task system being roll-under does create some issues in the game (the infamous rolling of ‘half dice’, and the increased emphasis of Characteristic scores of skills). There is a bit of errata too, and some of the text needs repeat reading to make sense of it.

There are, however, some very attractive colour plates of starship imagery in here, and while the rest of the layout isn’t flash - it’s not weak either. The cover is nice too and, at it’s core, this is actually a pretty good edition of the game to base star-travelling adventures from. Character generation is fun (as in the best Traveller editions) and the world and starship generators are pretty much the same as in all editions.

If you want a more concise attempt at an authentic version of Marc Miller’s personal vision of his own game than T5, then this will serve you well.

This product is basically a copy of two pages of Mongoose’s Traveller game. Nothing new to see, pretty much useless on it’s own, and flatly it seems that somebody is attempting to make a bit of easy profit out of an open system SRD.

There are no rules for generating characteristic scores in the Traveller SRD; this product fills that gap. There is nothing to say that SRDs have to be free - the Pathfinder core rulebook is not free yet that is a SRD/OGC; Mongoose publishing\'s own Legend series are all SRDs/OGC and they are not free either.

There are no rules for generating characteristic scores in the Traveller SRD; this product fills that gap. There is nothing to say that SRDs have to be free - the Pathfinder core rulebook is not free yet that is a SRD/OGC; Mongoose publishing\'s own Legend series are all SRDs/OGC and they are not free either.

This is pretty much a perfect game for what it sets out to do. It emulates the pulp/planetary romance genre with a real warmth and enthusiasm, whilst building on a simple system and rich setting within which there is a huge variety of options for gameplay. If you find traditional sci-fi games a bit too involved, complex and serious in tone, then this may well be the antidote. The system is completely compatible with the Doctor Who range also, and the production standards (especially the layout) is topnotch. As stated, a perfect game.

Some of the ideas and technology within the book has dated, and it could do with more character options to match the variety of later versions. However, all this said, as an example of concise efficacy and innovation, the game remains a true classic.